Managing an Internet outage

[Pedro Espinoza]

Reduce TTL to 5 mins or so, the way Akamai does. Then have some
rudimentary heart beat mechanism; whenever the node goes down, update
the A or CNAME record.

>  >>> We occasionally have a situation where our Internet access is completely
>  >>> down. My Manager has asked about the viability of locating a DNS server
>  >>> off site, and during a situation when we're down, modifying it so that
>  >> it
>  >>> resolves my entire domain to a single IP address. Web users would be
>  >>> redirected to that address, and a web page would explain we're off line.
>  >>>
>  >>> Our DNS TTL is set to 1 hour, however, I'm concerned that sites might
>  >>> cache that address for longer than the TTL, and affect things such as
>  >> mail
>  >>> delivery beyond the outage. Does anyone have an opinion on this plan?
>  >>> Obviously improving our redundancy is a better solution, and that will
>  >>> come in time. Right now this seems like a quick and easy (dirty)
>  >> solution.
>  >>>
>  >>> -Mike
>  >>>
>
>